Nofollow link

A nofollow link is a link carrying the attribute rel="nofollow", which tells search engines you are not vouching for the page you are linking to. Since 2019 it has two siblings, and together the three attributes let you label why a link should not count as your endorsement.

The three attributes

Google's current guidance assigns each a job:

• rel="sponsored" marks advertisements and paid placements. This is the required label for paid links.

• rel="ugc" marks links posted by your users, like comments and forum threads.

• rel="nofollow" covers everything else, "when other values don't apply, and you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site".

Hints

Originally nofollow was a directive Google always obeyed. That changed with the 2019 "evolving nofollow" announcement: the attributes became hints for ranking, and as of March 1, 2020, hints for crawling and indexing too. In practice Google usually will not follow or count a labeled link, but it reserves the right to, and the linked page may still be found through other routes like sitemaps or other sites.

Nofollow has no place on your own navigation. Google's advice for internal links you want kept out of crawling is robots.txt. Normal internal links should stay plain so they can pass link equity freely.

Nofollow in BeeRanked

BeeRanked's editor writes clean internal links with no rel attributes, so your own pages always pass value to each other, and external links you add in content are ordinary followed links unless you mark them otherwise.